English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Cerberus

00:42

@alphabet I wouldn't be surprised to see this, but I would consider it informal and not quite correct.

A kind of unintentional anacoluthon or garden path.

Xanne

00:54

@alphabet Do H&P pay much attention to register? Do they give sources for their sample sentences? A woman in Brooklyn is defending herself against a charge that a man was in her room. “Did he come in and I was still asleep? How would I know? So what can I tell you, officer?”

jlliagre

@Mitch Dictations are our closest equivalent to the US spelling bee contests. English focus on how to spell words while French focus on how to write sentences. One reason is it's harder to guess how a word is written from spoken English than French while it can be hard to guess how a verb is conjugated in a French sentence (several identically pronounced still distinct verbal forms) and how adjectives and past-participles have to agree in gender and in number, something unknown to English.

alphabet

@Xanne Here they do say that this construction is informal. To me it sounds wrong in any register, but apparently H&P disagree.

@Cerberus I've taken a break from going through very old questions and closing some of them, so that the numbers look better.

Cerberus

@alphabet Prescriptivist!

@alphabet Yeah, just leave those questions up!

They harm nobody.

alphabet

01:22

@Cerberus But I like seeing the number of unanswered questions go down. It makes me feel better about the world.

Cerberus

@alphabet It makes me feel worse if you do so by closing them...

Unless they are really bad.

alphabet

@Cerberus I also answer them sometimes.

Cerberus

That is better!

Laurel

@alphabet Find duplicates!

Also if you retag new questions you can help yourself find duplicates later

CowperKettle

America Is Using Up Its Groundwater Like There’s No Tomorrow - NY Times

The US has pumped so much groundwater that it's literally splitting the ground open across the American Southwest - Business Insider

Robusto

01:29

Sep 10 at 21:31, by Robusto

Farmers are depleting the Ogalala Aquiver because the government pays them to do it

@alphabet It sounds like something someone would say, no more, no less.

alphabet

02:13

Indeed. I do think the problem of water supply in California will eventually be solved by falling costs of seawater desalination (this article covers it), but Kansas is going to be in trouble

(I think Robusto knows my position about the long-term effects of decreasing food supplies. We will not all starve to death.)

CowperKettle

02:29

The last famine in Russia was in 1946-47, just a second ago, in historical terms

Soviet famine of 1946–1947

The Soviet famine of 1946–1947 was a major famine in the Soviet Union that lasted from mid-1946 to the winter of 1947 to 1948. The estimates of victim numbers vary, ranging from several hundred thousand to 2 million.: xv Recent estimates from historian Cormac Ó Gráda, show that 900,000 perished during the famine. Regions that were especially affected included the Ukrainian SSR with 300,000 dead, and the Moldavian SSR with 100,000 dead. Other parts of the Soviet Union such as the Russian SFSR and the Byelorussian SSR were also affected with 500,000 deaths. Elsewhere, malnutrition was widespread...

In Ukraine alone, in the spring of 1947 some 800 000 people had the diagnosis of "distrophia" (malnutrition)

This is wild, considering that Ukraine was always the breadbasket

alphabet

^ Some good news

CowperKettle

Yes, this is great, and I'm waiting on how the new "iron-air" batteries will turn out.

alphabet

Renewable energy will likely overtake fossil fuels on purely economic grounds

CowperKettle

I hope there will be enough energy to avoid some catastrophe.

Mitch

@jlliagre makes sense

@alphabet but that crossover point may take longer than we expect. So we still need nuclear power in the meantime. (Supposedly. That's what I heard someone say)

CowperKettle

02:43

James Fleay: "What's the Deal with Nuclear Energy?" | The Great Simplification #74

►

alphabet

@Mitch Agreed. I think that new, safer forms of nuclear power may encourage more widespread adoption.

The problem with nuclear power is that nobody wants to live right near a power plant.

Mitch

Ok then...federally paid for solar cells lining -all- the interstates

Laurel

@alphabet What about in cars and stuff?

Mitch

So much empty sunny land and once the panels are in place, you don't have to mow any more

Most of the power consumption is not from individual consumers, it's from industrial use. Nake those big companies feel guilty about leaving the lights on too

CowperKettle

nake

Verb: nake (third-person singular simple present nakes, present participle naking, simple past and past participle naked)

(now chiefly Scotland) To make naked; to bare.
naké (passive nakiimé)
(transitive) to drink (milk)
nake
(dated or formal) singular present subjunctive of naken
��3...

Noun: nake (plural nakvke)

thing
what? (interrogative pronoun)
...that which... (relative pronoun)

alphabet

02:51

@Laurel Projections of EV adoption vary widely, unfortunately

Laurel

Nobody can afford them

alphabet

It depends quite a lot on how battery technology evolves

Laurel

They've also made stupid design choices with some of them, like not having a way to be towed

But I would get an EV if I could. Not that I'd have anywhere to charge it rn at home

alphabet

Laurel

It just feels like a problem that only other people can fix

alphabet

02:57

The problem, of course, is that domestic policy can't solve this problem, since the US only makes up 15% of global emissions.

Laurel

But surely we're paying for some of the factories that are spewing out the crap elsewhere

alphabet

Not really; most of the increase in other countries is due to economic development

Laurel

Dang

alphabet

^ This is my evidence for the claim that climate change will mostly result in rich countries screwing over poor ones, rather than causing widespread destruction within rich countries themselves

Laurel

Pretty sure poor countries always get screwed over

alphabet

03:04

Yes, but this is "death and devastation" level. In theory, of course, wealthier, more developed countries could send economic aid to poorer ones to prevent catastrophe. In theory. That will not happen.

Laurel

:(

Stuff like this makes me unable to tolerate being on not-even-that-social-media such as Imgur

alphabet

Annoyingly, some of the charts that show more alarming results are based on the "worst-case" RCP8.5 scenario, which we know won't happen

Laurel

To be clear I can spend some time on Imgur but I just get sick of it after a while

sigh, I wonder if I can even make change happen locally for anything

CowperKettle

> “We found that, here in Georgia, white English speakers’ accents have been shifting away from the traditional Southern pronunciation for the last few generations,” said Margaret Renwick, associate professor in UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of linguistics and lead on the study. “Today’s college students don’t sound like their parents, who didn’t sound like their own parents.” news.uga.edu/classic-georgia-accent-fading-fast

alphabet

Note that, on the most likely scenarios, the decrease is less than 2% in the US

alphabet

03:57

^ Some interesting charts from this study: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/1/014010/meta

Under the "worst case" scenario (SSP3), world hunger (in absolute levels) is roughly stable despite climate change

(That study was cited by the IPCC so I'd trust it)

Another interesting study: doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.06.004

A way of quantifying the level of screwing-over-poor-countries we can expect

CowperKettle

Large explosion in Yevpatoria, Crimea en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevpatoria

"Walls were shaking" in some buildings t.me/Crimeanwind/42248

alphabet

But that study I cited above is interesting. It turns out I was actually overestimating the effects of climate change on food security; even under the worst case provided by the IPCC, the number of people at risk of hunger stays the same

CowperKettle

I'm afraid that the Peak Oil (gas, etc) will have an impact on food prices.

alphabet

(SSP3 being that worst case. There is an increase of ~25% on crop prices, but, as I predicted, this doesn't actually lead to a massive global famine.)

CowperKettle

Because fertilizers are made using natural gas, and food transportation requries a lot of fuel.

alphabet

04:11

I think it's quite unlikely that we'll reach peak oil before we stop using oil for things other than petrochemicals

Anyway, @Robusto , a study cited by the IPCC says that the worst-case climate change scenario will not increase the total number of people at risk of hunger, despite the increase in food prices. Of course, it would be much worse than the best-case scenario, but this is not going to be a mass-starvation event.

Cerberus

Perhaps in the longer term?

alphabet

@Cerberus I'd be hesitant to make predictions beyond 2100, but hunger levels would be on the decline at that point, and one would need good reason to posit a sudden increase afterwards.

Presumably there are some large error bars on those numbers. But it seems extremely unlikely that this would cause a catastrophic famine, particularly in the developed world.

Cerberus

Of course rich countries were never expected to suffer too much.

Except indirectly.

I'd be most concerned about crops in poor countries?

alphabet

@Cerberus That isn't the picture you get from more alarmist sources.

Cerberus

What sources?

I've never seen any (scientific) source say rich countries would suffer catastrophe?

alphabet

04:22

Activist types who insist that we'll have constant wars, global chaos, general descent into catastrophe.

Cerberus

The indirect effects are unknown.

alphabet

This view is completely inconsistent with the science, of course. But some people repeat it anyway.

Cerberus

But the dikes won't break, unless sea levels rise to extreme heights.

We can always build desalination plants if we should truly lack enough water for agriculture.

It's expensive, but it can be done.

Combined with far more efficient sprinklers.

As in Israel.

alphabet

Indeed. Wealthier Western countries can tolerate this. The rest of the world will find it more difficult (though the chart I cited above says inequality between countries will, in the worst case, be stable).

Robusto

04:41

@alphabet Well, now, all that could change in ways that cannot be predicted

2

And so to bed. Pleasant dreams.

Cerberus

05:47

@alphabet Yeah I think one issue is that none of these forecasts are reliable in the longer term, we just don't know what will happen.

At least it will happen gradually, so we'll have some time to adapt as much as possible.

Xanne

07:09

Wordle 817 5/6

🟨⬜🟨🟨⬜
⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟨🟩🟨
⬜🟩🟨🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

A couple of poor guesses there.

M.A.R.